Ask HN: Why isn't anyone creating or promoting an alternative to Twitter? In the midst of various problems faced by Twitter, an alternative application for Twitter has a great opportunity. As has happened during the migration of users from Digg to Reddit or from Yahoo to Google. But I don't see any Twitter alternatives popping up. |
I've written about some of the differences of these protocols here:
https://mirror.xyz/mattdesl.eth/_F9vQAUeeBB9AJNwMNaE_G5kTcl1...
I'm kind of surprised that whoever owns Tumblr this week isn't pushing it harder; Tumblr is, when it comes to it, more or less twitter without the character limit and with a much worse mobile app (most Twitter features were effectively copied from Tumblr).
That said, I'm not sure that there needs to be a single direct replacement for Twitter; historically, when a social network dies, generally it isn't replaced by a direct clone but by different things.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/11/elon-...
Note how few HN submissions point to masto posts, it's ~ 10,000:1 Tweets:Masto.
Yeah, I've largely moved over to Mastodon; most of the people I was most interested in following on Twitter are now there, so...
> It's really slow.
That's very instance-dependent. The one I use is pretty fast, certainly faster than Twitter these days (I note that loading timelines is no longer as snappy as it used to be.) I did previously use mastodon.online, and it was borderline unusably slow, granted.
> I want it to be good but the UX just sucks.
The UX is a mix of good and bad. It has a linear time-based feed with no helpful "suggestions", like Twitter a decade ago, which I would consider good. The UX around following people on other instances is bad (button to redirect you to your own instance) to comically bad (link to paste into your instance's search box) depending on instance setup...
> I hate to say it, but so far it's a different nature of beast which is not a viable Twitter replacement,
It is different, and it's certainly not a replacement for _all_ Twitter usecases, but it's largely good enough for me; I'm mostly now using Twitter just to observe the implosion of Twitter.
I doubt that, in five years, Mastodon will be the Twitter replacement. There may not be a single Twitter replacement. But it solves a decent subset of the things that Twitter solved for people, in a way that is in some ways nicer than Twitter (it never suggests that I follow weird Nazis, for instance).
> On May 6, 2014, the founders announced that subscription renewals had been so poor that there were no longer funds to retain development staff for App.net and future operations would be on a maintenance-only basis using contractors
I used to love that platform in its heyday. You didn't have to pay with your data, you paid with a thing called, you know, money (an esoteric term in social media circles).
The technology isn't impossible, but it needs a business plan that's not traditional advertising to have an decent be exit.
Ad money is drying up as companies are slashing online ad budgets. Now I'm sure eventually if Twitter goes down, traditional media will settle on a specific app to promote heavily, but this time, it will be on their terms.
Stay tuned for launch next week! :)
Mine is that it is invite-only, and if you break the rules, the person that invited you and everybody else they have invited gets booted from the platform. Apart from that, the only other rule is don't be illegal, don't spam, and post whatever the hell you want.
I don't mean it to replace Twitter. It's more like a social experiment. If there are permanent social consequences to being twats, what would a social network be like? Also, given this major risk, you'd only invite people you really know or trust.
I'm still ironing out the details of this thing. We'll see if I'll ever get to build it.
Like yours, mine is also a social experiment, but I don't care if not everyone wants a place like that. I know that at the very least a lot of people do. Still, without enough users it would die.
Right now this isn't a priority for me to build, but the code could be useful for other projects too, so why not.
A less extreme/draconian version of this sounds cool
This seems like a public square with the exact opposite goals of Elon (heavy moderation)
Bruh…
I want to test the hypothesis whether people can be nice and decent on the Internet without resorting to enforced real names and government approved access to the Web.
Mind you, you'd need to be a terrible person to be booted. Posting child porn. Inciting murder. Botting and spamming. Doxing and organising a mob. Why should terrible people to have a free pass? Why should one have a free pass for inviting a terrible person?
Again, I do not want to change the social media landscape. This would be performance art.